By default, WordPress allows all content to be “open” and viewable by anyone and allows the site owner to restrict specific content if desired by setting a password for the post.

With free and premium WordPress Membership Plugins you can restrict access to all or specific posts, pages and media by default.

WordPress Membership Plugin Features

So many free and premium Membership Plugins are available for WordPress. Here is a list of features different WordPress membership plugins offer.

Fully Automated Membership System

Content Protection

Unlimited Membership Levels

Multi Site License

Easy Member Management

Manually Approve Members

Partial Content Display

Secure RSS Feeds

Automatic Membership Upgrade

Login Redirection

Custom Registration Fields

Download Folder Protection

PayPal and other payment gateways Integration

Autoresponder Integration

Best Premium WordPress Membership plugins 2019

Premium membership plugins offers advanced features and regular updates. The purpose of membership sites is to earn passive income, so you shoud not hesitate to invest on powerful and trustworty plugins.

TipsandTricks-hq.com: has also created many different and very useful plugins for WordPress bloggers, You can download all WordPress Plugins from tipsandtricks-hq at their product page.

WP eStore + WP Affiliate + WP eMember + PDF Stamper + Lightbox Ultimate + WP Link Manager: The Mega Pack (Best Value) only costs you $174.95 and you will be able to use them on multiple sites without paying the extra fee every month/year.

MemberPress is an advanced buy yet easy to setup plugin that will help you build astounding WordPress membership sites, accept credit cards securely, control who sees your content and sell digital downloads all without the difficult setup.

You will be able to instantly start charging your users for access to your content.

MemberPress will help you confidently create, manage and track membership subscriptions and sell digital download products.

In addition to these features, MemberPress will allow you manage your members by granting and revoking their access to posts, pages, videos, categories, tags, feeds, communities, digital files and more based on what memberships they belong to.

Integrations Included

MemberPress integrates with many 3rd party solutions such as Stripe, HelpScount, WooCommerce, ActiveCampaign for processing payments, running an affiliate program, email and more. Oh, and they won’t “nickel & dime” you … MemberPress integrations are included!

Are You Ready to Start Your Membership Site?

With MemberPress plugin, You can create powerful and compelling WordPress membership sites that leverage all of the great features of WordPress, WordPress plugins and other 3rd party services including content management, forums, and social communities.

100% No-Risk Money Back Guarantee!

You are completely protected by our 100% No-Risk Guarantee. If you don’t like MemberPress over the next 14 days, They’ll happily refund 100% of your money. No questions asked.

YITH WOOCOMMERCE MEMBERSHIP is an ultimate solution for selling products like video courses, eBook,s plugin, themes etc with dedicated access is a great opportunity to increase your earnings: big companies like Udemy or Treehouse prove it, achieving a huge amount of sales volume with this business model.

This powerful plugin is created by yithemes, a dedicated marketplace for WooCommerce plugins and themes. YITH WOOCOMMERCE MEMBERSHIP comes with 30 DAYS MONEY BACK GUARANTEE and 100% refund if you are not satisfied.

WooCommerce Memberships is not just another plugin for restricting your site’s content: it’s an easy-to-use, site-wide membership solution that brings your content, shop, and memberships together.

“This is maybe one of the easiest and cleanest plugins when it comes to configuration…it’s super clean and easy to manage. You’re gonna love this plugin.” – Chris Lema

Memberships allows you to create an entire membership system that’s seamlessly tied to your store.

You can restrict your content to members, but you can also “drip” that content over time to schedule when members have access. Sell access to memberships, include memberships with product purchases, manually assign memberships, and completely integrate member perks within your store.

Sell or Assign Memberships

Memberships are not a specific type of WooCommerce product; instead, membership plans are created independently from products. This lets you determine how access is granted for maximum flexibility. You can assign 0 or more products (of almost any type) to a membership plan to support several types of memberships.

8. Ultimate Member

Ultimate Member is another free and up to date WordPress membership plugin. It requires WordPress 4.1 or higher and compatible up to WordPress 4.4.2.

A lightweight yet powerful plugin that will turn your simple WordPress website into a fully functional membership website. It allows you to add beautiful user profiles to your site and is perfect for creating advanced online communities.

Ultimate Member is a Lightweight and highly extensible free membership plugin, that allows you to create almost any type of site where users can join and become members with absolute ease.

More than 15 free and premium add-ons are also available for this free WordPress membership plugin. Google reCAPTCHA and Online Users are two free add-ons. Social Activity, WooCommerce, Private Messages, Real-time Notifications MailChimp, User reviews are few premium add-ons for Ultimate Member.

Ultimate Member has been translated into the many languages including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, Swedish and many more.

According to Groups WordPress membership plugin developers, it is designed as an efficient, powerful and flexible solution for group-oriented membership and content access control.

With Many available add-ons, you can easily enhance the functionality of this plugin. With this free plugin you can create an unlimited number of groups and assigning users to different groups is also possible.

Groups plugin supports custom capabilities for groups: allow you to define new capabilities for use in plugins and web applications. Groups offer Built-in access control that allows to restrict access to posts, pages and custom content types to specific groups and users only.

Groups for WordPress plugin is also multisite compatible, all features are supported independently for each blog in WordPress multi-site installations.

10. Membership 2

This WordPress Membership plugin is another popular and free plugin from WPMUDev. Membership 2 is a free plugin to transforms your WordPress website into a fully functional membership site.

4.0.0.7 is the latest version of membership 2 is completely rewritten. This plugin provides access to downloads, online content, videos, forums and support. The new plugin is easy to use and it adapts to the situation very well.

Membership 2 even includes set-and-forget automated recurring payments, so you can focus on providing value while getting income from your members.

The plugin provides interactive setup wizard that will guide you through each and every step to install it. The special features that membership pro provides its customers with are as follows fully integrated coupon system. Coupon system helps to attract new customers.

Membership 2 allows you to easily accept payments via PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net. You can even get paid via good old-fashioned manual payments. A premium version is also available, which offers more advanced features.

There are four Kinds of membership packages available

Standard Membership

Dripped Content Membership

Guest Membership

Default Membership

Admin-side protection rules: This plugin gives it users the power to protect the website from different dangerous attacks.Custom post-type protection: This plugin also provides protection to the post types that is not native to WordPressAdvanced media protection rules: Provide much more strong rules to protect media filesNetwork Wide Protection: You can handle your site while sitting anywhere in the world.

With this free plugin, you can set up unlimited membership levels (example: free, silver, gold etc) and protect your posts and pages using the membership levels you create.

Protecting your content is very easy because, when you are writing or editing a post or page in the WordPress editor, you can select to protect that post or page for your members.

You can configure it to have free and/or paid memberships on your site. Paid membership payment is handled securely via PayPal. Simple Membership plugin records all the payments from your members, you can view them anytime by visiting the payments menu from the admin dashboard.

12. Memberful WP

An easy to use plugin, that would require very less time and effort to convert your simple website into a membership website. It will make easy for your community to support your work through this simple membership software.

Sell memberships and restrict access to content with WordPress and Memberful. This is a very simple WordPress membership plugin that integrates your site with Memberful. Memberful is a service for selling subscriptions to your website with Stripe.

Memberful.com offers three pricing plans to get started. Starter plan is free, which lets you create 2 subscription plans. Pro plans will cost you $25/month and ENTERPRISE plan $100/month.

13. WP-Members: Membership Framework

WP-Members: Membership Framework is another free membership plugin that is compatible with WordPress 4.4.2. It requires WordPress 3.1 or higher. It is a scalable plugin that provides the freedom to customize your WordPress website with the look and feel.

It is a great free membership plugin for sites and blogs offering premium content to subscribers. With WP-Members you can allow members to log in from the front end of your website.

To use WP-Members: Membership Framework, you don’t need to modify or customize your theme. WP-Members also offers the ability to change the default plugin settings.

For those that simply want to utilize the member management features and possibly restrict some content, the default setting can easily be toggled to block or unblock pages and/or posts by default.

WP-Members: Membership Framework features

Block posts, pages, both, or none by default

Inline and sidebar Login and Registration

User registration and profile integrated into your theme

Notify admin and hold registrations of new user registrations for approval

11 responses on “Top 14 Best Free WordPress Membership Plugins for 2019 – Make Passive Income with Membership Sites”

Thanks for this write-up!
Great list. Awesome post!
I used UserPlace – A complete Free WordPress Membership Plugin. Excellent plugin with great documentation, It is very nice and simply superb. It has easy settings to understand. And many free features. Great WordPress Membership Plugin. Best FREE membership plugin!

Just wanted to see if you would consider including Armemberplugin.com (ARMember) membership plugin for WordPress. At the time of writing this, we have almost 6,000 ARMember users and 4,400websites running ARMember.

It would be a shame if your readers didn’t even consider ARMember when doing their membership plugin research. So hope you consider including us on your list.

I am using DIVI to manage website I want a plugin for a group of members that will:
– set it up so only members can get into protected pages
– allow each member to change the password
– protect pages from non-members
– allow import/export of members

Is it possible to integrate it into the multisite signup form? After a user fill the fields in the first step ( username and password ) and select the “Gimme a site” option, on the step two user see the plans radio inputs besides the site name and site title fields.

Anyone know which is the best free plugin if I want to emulate Meetup. com and create a group event site? So I need…

1 Commerce for paid and free members
2 Event creation with rsvp and email reminders with calendar
3 Group creation with organizer and sub-organizer roles
4 Email ability for organizers to newsletter their group

That’s a brilliant article on membership plugins. I really loved your list of membership plugins and the research you have done.

I think Paid Member Subscriptions is an excellent membership plugin. If you are looking to drip content to a specific group of users rather than making it available in one go, then MagicMembers is the plugin for you.